


Valley of the Dogs

by PaxVobis



Category: Fight Club (1999), Fight Club - All Media Types, Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Genre: Based on the Novel & the Film, Blood, Blood and Injury, Brad Pitt - Freeform, Dildos, Dogs, Dominance, Dreams, Dreams vs. Reality, Emotional Manipulation, Hallucinations, Homoeroticism, M/M, Marijuana, Marla's Dildo, Mocking, Mouth trauma, Narrator is Gay, No Sex, Power Dynamics, Power Play, Self-Harm, Sleep Deprivation, Smoking, Tags Contain Spoilers, The Narrator's Puckered Cheek Asshole, no sleep, pet death, style imitation, toxic masculinity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-07 08:11:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15904344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaxVobis/pseuds/PaxVobis
Summary: Tyler is taunting me.He knows that at some point I’m going to succumb.  I have to succumb.  No one ever died from lack of sleep.  It can be delayed but it can’t be defeated.“Seriously, man.  You’re not even awake, you’re dreaming.  I am your dream, you are dreaming.”  Tyler leans forward in the chair, looming through the darkness, and plucks the joint from behind his ear.  “It’s over,” he says, staring into my eyes, and when I don’t break eye contact he smiles.“Just shut your eyes.”“And give.”“In.”





	Valley of the Dogs

Tyler is taunting me.

He knows that at some point I’m going to succumb.  I have to succumb.  No one ever died from lack of sleep.  It can be delayed but it can’t be defeated.  You’re just watching the seconds slip away from you.  You’re just watching your life ending, one minute at a time.

I have been awake for 126 hours.  Or I haven’t been Tyler for 126 hours.  I’m watching the minutes pass on my wristwatch.  That’s every day of the working week plus the soft torture Marla puppets my upright corpse through: Introduction to Cardio Yoga.  Preparing meals for the homeless, distributing blankets on the street.  Pinball tournament at the arcade, free pizza.  You don’t need body odor to come here but it helps.  Swing dance, Marla clasping my bloated hands in her cold, thin little fingers and beaming like the skin has pulled back on her skull in death.  Have you ever tried to swing dance after 102 hours awake?

Don’t.

“You have to sleep sometime.  Like death, it can be delayed, but it can’t be defeated.”

That’s Tyler.  That’s pure Tyler.  I’ve been picking at my thoughts, like I pick at my scabs to bear the silvery scar tissue still knotting beneath, and usually it’s obvious what is Tyler and what is me, what is scar and what is original skin.  This time it’s easier.  I’m not asleep, but after 126 hours, you start to hallucinate.

Microsleeps.  Your body is upright.  Your eyes are open.  But your brain is flickering, the powerhouse of the hypothalamus is shorting out.  Tyler is sitting in the corner of the room with his leg across his knee, looking at me with his dumb California eyes and his head buzzed back to suede.  To Full Metal Jacket.  Wearing ugly thrift shop fur and his sunglasses tucked into the neck of his mesh shirt, and his hand is dangling over the back of the wooden chair with its fingers splinted together, and it’s creaking under the weight of all his muscle.

Tyler is here in the Regent Hotel with me.  With Marla.  And he’s taunting me.

“Seriously, man.  You’re not even awake, you’re dreaming.  I am your dream, you are dreaming.”  Tyler leans forward in the chair, looming through the darkness, and plucks the joint from behind his ear.  “It’s over,” he says, staring into my eyes, and when I don’t break eye contact he smiles.

I look at the ceiling.  It’s not over.  If it’s over then what’s the point of telling me it’s over.

“As if you ever really knew what I was doing.”

That’s not true.  I imagined Tyler.  I’m imagining him right now.  The only way that I can possibly see Tyler is if I’m imagining him.  I can only imagine Tyler if I’m awake, somewhere, somehow.  So it can’t be over.

I tug my eyelids open and imagine I’m being tortured.  Then I don’t.  Imagining is next to sleep, so I look at the mildewy ceiling with the mould spots and I don’t imagine them to be anything, I just see them.  I look sideways at Marla, crashed beside me asleep in a stupid mauve crinkle dress that makes her look like a stack of dry waffles.  I think about waking her up, then I think about breakfast, chain restaurant ads pouring cold maple syrup over airbrushed pancakes.  I hear Tyler shift his weight on the chair.  I can’t be hearing that, but I do.

“Why don’t you wake her up?” he says softly, and I don’t look at him.

If I have to listen to Marla complain about keeping me awake for another second, I really will fall asleep.

Tyler laughs through his nose.  I can hear a cigarette lighter.  Smell smoke, tobacco and marijuana.  God, Tyler, don’t smoke that.  Getting high makes you fall asleep.

“I don’t sleep,” says Tyler, like I needed to hear that.

Isn’t that the way it works?  I sleep, Tyler’s awake.  Tyler sleeps, I’m awake.  Shift work.  Tyler shakes his head, exhaling pot smoke through a chuckle.

“No, I don’t sleep.”  He brings down his hand on the knee of his cargo pants sharply.  “You know that, man.”  Yeah, I do.  I stare at the ceiling.  Tyler busies himself playing with the laces of his curb stompers, aping fascist.

He’s bored.  He wants to go out.  No one likes a waiting room.  No one likes to think they have to wait, but screw you, Tyler, because we all have to wait.  Every one of us lines up waiting for our turn to be fucked over, every one of us lines up and waits like domestic animals.  Domestic animals, they all share traits.  Less fight, less fear.  Forward-facing eyes.  Or black and white spots.  Humans show every one of those traits, so who’s domesticating us?

We’re domesticating ourselves.

“In a movie of your life, who would play you?” asks Tyler, bored.

What?

“I’m asking.”  Tyler gives me this blank, dog-eyed look, like a Labrador.  “You want a distraction, I’m distracting you.”

And he turns the cigarette lighter between his bruised fingers, leaning back in the chair.  You know dogs, they don’t have to guard us.  They could turn on us whenever they wanted; soon as it occurs to him, Bud could take the throats out of your kids.  But he doesn’t.  Death is inevitable.  Those accepting, big brown eyes, and when you go to put him down and you can’t stand to watch him die, he’s alone, looking around desperately for you.  For God.  And you’re not even there.

Valley of the Dogs. 

I look Tyler in the eye and I say, fuck, I don’t know, Brad Pitt?

Tyler laughs at me, and you can hear the way his tongue curls in disgust, up against the open wound where his teeth have cut into his cheek.  The taste of the raw, open flesh like raspberry seeds, it’s sobering.

“Brad Pitt?  You read too much Reader’s Digest, man.”

It keeps me awake.

“ _It keeps me awake,_ ” says Tyler in a bratty whine, mocking me, and he bobs his head like a pigeon.  Another domestic species.  The blue smoke curls out of the joint in his fingertips in the moonlight through the rotting curtains of the Regent Hotel.  “You could do anything.  You want to stay awake, you could do _anything_.  But you just _lie there_ , like a beaten dog.”

Learned helplessness.  Eventually the animal just gives up and stops moving, hoping that at least you won’t kill it.  No.  I’ve just run out of ideas.

“But you’re not an animal,” says Tyler, his arms folded over his chest.  Watching me.  “Animals, man, an animal would be out there.  An animal would hunt, or it would fuck, or it’d be running for its life.”

Tyler says, “That’s all there is.”

Tyler says, “It’s a testament to your _humanity_ that when faced with life threatening danger, you stay totally still.”

Tyler says, “It’s a testament to your manhood that you freeze.”

You know, I’m really starting to wish he’d quit it with the _testes_ there.  Tyler smiles at me, and holds the joint between his teeth.

“As soon as you fall asleep, I claim your balls.”

Yeah, yeah.  Old news.  It’s not going to happen.

“We had a deal.  You broke it.  You promised not to mess with me.”

You should have known better than to trust me.

Tyler looks at me for a long time, his gaze cold and smug, and then he leans back, rolling his buzzed scalp against Marla’s gross florid wallpaper.  Yellowed flowers turned parchment brown in the dark, like sheep’s bellies, vellum.  He stretches out, reaching for the dildo on her dresser, and flicks the end with his fingertips so that it quivers like a frightened animal.

“Quit your job,” says Tyler.

No.  I like my job.

“That’s a lie.”

We lie to ourselves all the time.

Tyler tilts his head, gazing out the window.  He ashes the joint on the top of Marla’s dresser, but it’s my arm that burns, lined already in black, ugly little rosettes from the soft crook of my elbow to my wrist.  Anything to keep me awake.  I’ve tried extinguishing them on the burn on the back of my hand, but the scars where Tyler’s lips pressed against my hand are just gristle; I feel nothing. 

After Tyler’s kiss, nothing hurts.

“You’re lying to yourself,” he says, “When you think that I seriously won’t take your god damn balls.”

Tyler is standing up now.  His shadow crawls up the wallpaper like a spider, spreading its long limbs lazily over the faded petunias, the daisies, the withered roses.  “You don’t know what I’m capable of,” says Tyler, and his threat is playful, dancing like his shadow.

I think I do.

Tyler fucking hates it when I respond like this.  You can tell from the way he snorts and looks away, the way he defaults to humor like the shitty kid snapping pencils in the back of your grade school math class.  Muffled sniggering through his nose and his curled lip, split from a blow in the basement of a dingy bar somewhere, somewhere I’ve never been.  In Illinois.  In Alaska.  In Hong Kong, who cares. 

“You don’t need to lie to yourself, man,” says Tyler with a cheeky smile that tugs at his handsome cheeks, lacerated inside, making them bleed between his teeth.  “I mean, you won’t even miss them.  You’re not _using_ them.”

I mean, that’s critically not the point.

“Why hold on to something so desperately because you _might_ use it, one day.  People die alone in tombs of crap because they _might_ use it _one day_.  Just let it go,” says Tyler.  The burn on my arm tingles, pulsates, connects with all the others.

“Just let go,” says Tyler.

“Just shut your eyes,” says Tyler.

“And give.”

“In.”

No.

“Then fuck Marla.  She’s right there – that’s what you want, isn’t it?” he taunts me, walking around the bed to Marla’s side.  It’s narrow and she’s right up against my body, both of us fully clothed, but she’s on her side with her back to me.  Her shoulders rising and falling in her deep, deep sleep.  Tyler leans over her, he touches her cheek with the backs of his fingers.  I’d lash out at him if he weren’t me right now.  If I wasn’t imagining him right now.  I have to not imagine.

I don’t want to fuck Marla.

“Then what’s,” says Tyler, looking right at me where he’s bent over her, his face shadowed with the window behind him, “The point.”

Still working that out.

Tyler laughs as if he knows, his teeth bloody from his cheeks.  But Tyler can’t know, because Tyler is me.  I only know what Tyler knows, Tyler only knows what I know.  He can parade this shit around like he knows it, like a new age guru walking barefoot through the ghettos, but he’s still just a dumb, metropolitan, waxed up twink.

Tyler is right in my face.  Inches from me.  I can feel his breath on my cheek, dank with marijuana, the fatigue fuzz of sickness on his tongue.  I can smell his blood, reddening his lip, making it black in the darkness.  His hand is cradling my jaw, making me look into his black dog eyes, his thumb tracing over the divot of the puckered asshole punched through my cheek.  His mouth, hot and close to mine, just another damp, hungry hole, sucking.

“Don’t lie to yourself,” says Tyler, his voice hoarse and slashed.

But I lie to myself all the time.

Tyler is my lie.

And the next thing I know, Marla is standing over the bed in the cold light of morning, poking my lips with the dildo and making the appropriate cartoon sound effect to accompany it.  “Wakey-wakey, eggs and bakey!  You didn’t move an inch all night!”

But I can already smell the gasoline.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments & feedback keep me going. Thanks for being kick ass.


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